Resident physicians' clinical training poses unique challenges for the delivery of safe patient care. Residents face special risks of involvement in medical errors since they have tremendous responsibility for patient care, yet they are novice practitioners in the process of learning and mastering their profession. The present study explores…

Internists are required to perform a number of procedures that require mastery of technical and non-technical skills, however, formal assessment of these skills is often lacking. The purpose of this study was to develop, implement, and gather validity evidence for a procedural skills objective structured clinical examination (PS-OSCE) for internal…

The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) implemented work hour restrictions for physicians in training in 2003 that were revised July 1, 2011. Current published data are insufficient to assess whether such work hour restrictions will have long-term impact on residents' education. We searched computer-generated reports…

Although the process of diagnosing invariably begins with a heuristic, we encourage our learners to support their diagnoses by analytical cognitive processes, such as Bayesian reasoning, in an attempt to mitigate the effects of heuristics on diagnosing. There are, however, limited data on the use ± impact of Bayesian reasoning on the accuracy of…

Objective structured clinical examinations (OSCEs) are used worldwide for summative examinations but often lack acceptable reliability. Research has shown that reliability of scores increases if OSCE checklists for medical students include only clinically relevant items. Also, checklists are often missing evidence-based items that high-achieving…

A growing group of inpatients on acute clinical teaching units have non-acute needs, yet require attention by the team. While anecdotally, these patients have inspired frustration and resource pressures in clinical settings, little is known about the ways in which they influence physician perceptions of the learning environment. This qualitative…

Although the clinical clerkship model is based upon sound pedagogy, including theories of social learning and situated learning, studies evaluating clinical performance of residents suggests that this model may not fully meet the learning needs of students. Here our objective was to design a curriculum to bridge the learning gaps of the existing…

For patients at the end of life, it is crucial to address the psychological, existential, and spiritual distress of patients. Medical education research suggests trainees feel unprepared to provide the whole person, humanistic care held as the ideal. This study used an empirically based narrative intervention, the dignity interview, as an…

In recent years, postgraduate assessment programmes around the world have embraced workplace-based assessment (WBA) and its related tools. Despite their widespread use, results of studies on the validity and reliability of these tools have been variable. Although in many countries decisions about residents' continuation of training and…

Supervisor assessments are critical for both formative and summative assessment in the workplace. Supervisor ratings remain an important source of such assessment in many educational jurisdictions even though there is ambiguity about their validity and reliability. The aims of this evaluation is to explore the: (1) construct validity of ward-based…

This case-study compared traditional, face-to-face classroom-based teaching with asynchronous online learning and teaching methods in two sets of students undertaking a problem-based learning module in the multilevel and exploratory factor analysis of longitudinal data as part of a Masters degree in Public Health at Maastricht University. Students…

Reliability estimations of workplace-based assessments with the mini-CEX are typically based on real-life data. Estimations are based on the assumption of local independence: the object of the measurement should not be influenced by the measurement itself and samples should be completely independent. This is difficult to achieve. Furthermore, the…

Undergraduate medical education is too long; it does not meet the needs for physicians' workforce; and its content is inconsistent with the job characteristics of some of its graduates. In this paper we attempt to respond to these problems by streamlining medical education along the following three reforms. First, high school graduates would be…

Clinicians are believed to use two predominant reasoning strategies: system 1 based pattern recognition, and system 2 based analytical reasoning. Balancing these cognitive reasoning strategies is widely believed to reduce diagnostic error. However, clinicians approach different problems with different reasoning strategies. This study explores…

In the domain of self-assessment, researchers have begun to draw distinctions between summative self-assessment activities (i.e., making an overall judgment of one's ability in a particular domain) and self-monitoring processes (i.e., an "in the moment" awareness of whether one has the necessary knowledge or skills to address a specific problem…